Disc analyser news update

Dave McGuire wrote: As I understand it, you can design a MIPS chip based on the published specs and not have to pay any licensing fees. There was a patent on the unaligned load/store instructions, but that expired in 2006 AIUI. The same could probably be said about m68k, but I'm not entirely sure I'd /want/ to clone the 68K unless I wanted to do an Amiga or Atari ST reimplementation of some kind (yes, I know about Minimig and Suska, I've had the Suska WD1772 HDL running on the DiscFerret). My current "Super Fun Evening Project" is to get a MIPS32r2 core running on my Altera DE1 development board, just for fun. Then I plan to kit it out with an LCD driver (framebuffer type) and make it run MIPSLinux (or at least U-Boot and one of the free RTOSes, e.g. eCos or RTEMS). Then the icing on the cake... make it drive a basic logic analyser. It's a bit of fun at least :) It is for this reason that I've borrowed a copy of "See MIPS Run" (by D. Sweetman) from the university library.... and a copy of "The 68000 Microprocessor" (3ed by J. L. Antonakos) just for grins :) -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/